George Fralick was in luck. Traveling at the maximum cruising speed which the corporate marshal’s long range shuttle could muster, he was only a day out from the Narsai system before he encountered a starship.
Here in the reaches between inhabited systems, sending a comm all the way to Terra—or even to New Orient—was not possible. One ship alone could not muster the necessary power, that had to be drawn from a star and it required booster equipment that normally was installed only in planetary orbit. So the captain of the ship that found Fralick and took him aboard had a decision to make.
To head for Narsai, and attempt to deal with the situation there on her own? Or to continue on course toward New Orient, and from there let Fralick report everything he had seen so that higher authorities could determine what should be done next?
Sally Greenberg did what any captain would have done, she ordered her ship to come about. Nine against one? Lousy odds, to be sure, but unlike the Archangel her ship would have the advantage of knowing what it was sailing into instead of being taken by surprise while in planetary orbit. She’d been in worse fights, and to those people on Narsai it might make all the difference whether help came in a day’s time or in several weeks’ time instead.
It was like an omen, Fralick thought as he stood beside the trim young woman on the bridge of her ship and watched while the viewscreen began to show the first clear images of Narsai’s sun. His first and only command had been named Raven; and that was also the name of this vessel, built years after his Raven had been decommissioned and many times larger and more powerful. But that had been a lucky ship for him then, and he was convinced that this Raven was going to be another lucky ship for him now.
“We’re being hailed by a freighter, Captain,” came a voice from ops. Fralick did something he hadn’t done in years; he came damned close to answering, as if he had forgotten all the time that had passed and once again thought he was in command here.
Greenberg didn’t notice. She said, “On screen, Ensign.”
A grizzled fellow in civvies appeared, and identified himself promptly. “Angstrom, Tor. Wondering if you’re headed into Narsai, Captain…?”
Damn, the bastard was Narsatian. Both the accent and the lack of decent formality even with a Star Service command officer gave him away.
“Greenberg. Commanding Raven,” the Service officer responded with a glimmer of humor in her eyes. Plainly she wasn’t as bothered by Narsatian antics as Fralick was; but then, she hadn’t been subjected to Katy Romanova for the past forty years. “Yes, that’s our destination. I understand that you’ve had some trouble there, Captain Angstrom.”
“We thought so, too, at first. And you Star Service folks aren’t going to be happy, there was a ship lost.” Angstrom was not just Narsatian, he was lower class Narsatian. Barely literate, probably, although he had to know his maths and his sciences or he wouldn’t be able to command anything that was warp-capable. “But I thought you might already have heard something. Some bastard of a stuffed shirt diplomat named Fralick managed to get his tail between his legs and run during the battle—all fifteen minutes of it! And after our people were able to talk to their people, the ones from Mistworld, it got straightened out okay. Looks as if we’ve got new trade opportunities, and a place to settle population overflow so we might not have to be so damned rigid about family size, instead of being about to be conquered and occupied—or just plain blown to hell, the way it looked like for awhile there.”
“I’m Fralick.” To have denied it, or even to have remained decently in the background, was impossible for him right now. Greenberg at first looked surprised, then affronted; and she was within her rights, this was her bridge and the Kesran ambassador should have kept his mouth shut until she gave him leave to speak. But he rushed on, because this was one of the few times in George Fralick’s careful life when he could not control his own mouth. “Yes, I managed to escape before the Rebs shot me up along with the starship they destroyed. And a whole orbital habitat, too, if my instruments were reading correctly. How many human lives was that, Captain Angstrom? At what point will your expanded trade opportunities give you payback for their deaths?”
“Too bad, but the Star Service shot first and the Misties just shot back,” Angstrom responded, not at all abashed to learn that the personage he had just maligned had heard him do so. “Don’t know who hit the habitat. For your information it wasn’t destroyed, although people on it did die—but if we did know whose shot went wild, that couldn’t bring any of them back. Damned shame, of course, but letting a war start over it wouldn’t help anyone either. Just more people dead, is all we’d get for doing that.”
Greenberg braced her shoulders. She was a pretty woman, Fralick had noticed that immediately; willow-slim in a way that Katy never had been, not even before three pregnancies and then retirement had put extra flesh onto her already rather large-boned frame. Yet Katy had always attracted him, she still did whenever he somehow wound up in the same room with her.
Why? He still didn’t know, not even after forty years.
Greenberg was saying, “So you’re telling me I don’t need to rush the rest of the way in and rescue the good people of Narsai, Captain Angstrom? You think they’re all right?”
“Well, ma’am, at least I’d suggest you might want to comm them at Narsai Control as soon as you get within range. They can tell you a lot more than I can, but when I left things seemed to be going along fine. No one tried to shoot at me or keep me from sailing, anyway, and in my experience keeping every ship in harbor is the first thing a real enemy does.” Angstrom gave Greenberg the confidential grin of one old salt to another, and to Fralick’s absolute disbelief Greenberg grinned back.
“Safe journey, Captain,” she said formally. “Ensign, end transmission.” Then without looking at Fralick she added, “Now start hailing Narsai Control. Let me know the minute you get through to them.”
In their bedroom in the little house at the edge of MinTar, Katy Romanova and Lincoln Casey were just waking. It was morning—the second morning since Katy had taken her peaceful walk out to the terrace and had savored the early-autumn beauty of her garden, and had come inside expecting to discard her robe and spend a passionate half-hour in her husband’s arms. Instead Dan Archer had brought Rachel Kane through the front door—George Fralick had called from orbit, demanding a haven for Maddy—and since then, there had been no more peace until just a few hours ago.
They had slept now, until both were rested. When Linc reached out into another of the house’s three small bedrooms and sought Maddy’s mind, he discovered that the little girl was still slumbering soundly.
He let his wife know that. And then, very gently, he reached into her thoughts and he touched painful old memories.
This time she let him. She was ready now, she wanted that last barrier between them to come down at last. And although he was just as outraged as she had known he would be, just as angry with Fralick and just as hurt for her sake, the disgust she had feared never manifested itself in his thoughts.
“You really were scared that I wouldn’t want you anymore, if I knew George forced himself on you and you didn’t kill him for it?” Linc was holding her, her head tucked against his shoulder and their naked bodies pressed as close as if they had just made love. But they hadn’t, and this morning that might not be going to happen as usual—not because of any distaste for the idea on Casey’s part, but because right now Katy Romanova didn’t want even this man to touch her in that most intimate of ways.
She whispered with her voice as well as with her thoughts, “Of course I was. I was a starship captain, for gods’ sake! I should have been able to protect myself, that shouldn’t have happened to me! But it did—and if I’d fought back in the only way that would have worked, I’d have lost Maddy completely. And probably my own life, too, because while a human’s never been ritually executed on Kesra killing my mate would have been apt to make me be the first.”
“And do you really think I wish you’d taken that risk? Either of those risks?” Linc’s hand cradled her head, and his lips brushed tenderly against her hair. “Katy, the only reason I’m the least bit upset with you is that you didn’t tell me about this a long time ago. But Fralick, on the other hand…! The bastard. How could the skipper I looked up to when I was twenty-two years old, have done that to you? Or to any woman, for that matter?”
“He thought because I was his wife, he had that right. I know it sounds crazy, but from the way he acted afterward—as if it was nothing, as if he couldn’t figure out why I was so hurt and so shaken up—I’m sure he really didn’t believe he’d done anything wrong.” Katy sighed, and shifted in her husband’s embrace so that she could look up at him. “‘Just one more time, after hundreds of other times,’ he said.”
“He had to know he’d hurt you.” The golden Morthan eyes that met her human brown ones were grim.
“Yes, he knew that. But he thought it was my own fault, because I fought him when I should have cooperated. Linc, he’d been a good lover; it may not be decent for me to tell you that, but it’s true.” Katy blinked back tears that until now she hadn’t shed. “When we were young he made me think I was in heaven, and even later on the physical part usually gave me just as much pleasure as it did him. That had nothing to do with why I wanted to divorce him, that last night before I left was the only time in more than twenty years together that he ever took me by force.”
“But that time he did,” Linc answered. “And there’s no excuse, Katy. None. I don’t want to hear about his culture, I don’t want to hear that he blamed you and you bought at least a little piece of that argument. He should have been executed, not you, and you know that as well as I know it even if you don’t want to admit it to me.”
“But I still didn’t want to see him dead.” She shook her head, and the tears spilled over at last although they did so in silence. “I can’t explain it in a way that you’ll understand, Linc. He’s Maddy’s father, he’s someone I once loved almost as much as I love you. I wanted him where he could never hurt me again—but I didn’t need revenge. And if I was going to go on being part of my daughter’s life, even the small part of it that was all the Kesran authorities would allow, I couldn’t have it even if I did want it.”
And that was at the heart of the bargain she’d made with perdition. She had not seen it before, but as always when she laid a problem out before Linc and looked at it with him she saw things that had eluded her while she did the analysis alone.
“He’s Maddy’s father,” Casey repeated, as he put up a hand and gently brushed at the tears on his wife’s cheeks. “And you did what you had to do, to protect her and to protect your relationship with her. But that’s all it was, Katy. Wasn’t it?”
She hid her face against him then, and she sobbed. The pain and humiliation and outrage of thirteen years past spilled out with her tears; and with them also came the grief for the love that had still been present—wounded and starved, but lingering—and had died at last, in those moments when Fralick had taken final advantage of that tenderness and in doing so had battered it out of existence forever.
Sally Greenberg felt the hair rising on the back of her neck, but the cause of that phenomenon wasn’t the transmission she had just received from Narsai Control. What she had been told had astonished her, there was no doubt about that. But being able to surrender assumptions when they were proved false was one skill a starship captain couldn’t live without; so she was already adjusting to idea that “Misties” (as the Narsatians with their fondness for name-shortening had already christened them) from Mistworld had come sailing in here yesterday, and had started negotiating successfully with the local authorities. Misties who were somehow allied with those renegade humans who until today Greenberg had referred to as “Rebs” right along with the rest of her associates, but whom she now had been forcefully reminded had committed no offenses to earn that nickname unless one counted fighting back when a Star Service ship had fired on them without warning.
She still found it hard to accept that as fine an officer as Paolo Giandrea had done that, but she was obliged to accept it because there were too many trustworthy witnesses to yesterday’s events—Giandrea’s chief medical officer among them. And she did know that every captain was human, herself included, so although it was hard to grasp it certainly was not impossible to believe.
She had allowed Ambassador Fralick to sit with her in her office while she talked with Narsai Control, and she had given him a ferocious glare every time he had been about to butt in. Now the transmission was over, and he was the one who was glaring at her. So she opened hostilities by asking, “What are you thinking, Ambassador?”
She wondered whether he still deserved that title or not, since she had heard sector-wide news more recently than he had heard it and he probably didn’t yet know that Kesra had finally evicted its small number of human residents. So although she hadn’t heard specifically that Fralick was included in that expulsion, she rather expected that he had been—and that either the Kesrans were going to let their always lackadaisical participation in the Commonwealth lapse entirely, or they were finally going to appoint someone of their own species to represent them.
In any case she concurred with the label the freighter captain had used for Fralick. She’d read her history, she knew that once this man had been a valuable diplomat; but now he was just what Angstrom had called him, a stuffed shirt.
If that wasn’t being too kind. Fralick said, “You’re taking your ship into a trap, Captain.”
“I don’t think so.” Greenberg’s eyes narrowed. “But I appreciate your concern, Ambassador, and I promise you we’re going to use caution.”
“Caution? Against creatures that can take over human beings’ bodies?” The diplomat’s voice rose a notch. Plainly that notion frightened him, with a fear that was genuine and not worked up in an effort to convince her she ought to feel it too.
“That isn’t what the Morthan healer, that Marin fellow, said.” Mentally Greenberg made a note to check with Fleet Command to see whether she really was going to be required to replace her ship’s own staff of Morthan medics when she returned to base at the end of this patrol. She did not want to do that, she couldn’t imagine a sickbay that was stuck using human doctors. “He said that the Misties—”
“‘Misties’! Give them a cute nickname, and suddenly they’re as safe as pets to have around!” Fralick exploded, then. “Captain, my sons died at Mistworld. All three of them. I never blamed the natives there half as much as I blamed the captain who was playing at being a commodore, who lost them—”
“Your wife, at that time, as I recall.” Greenberg was too young to have fought in that battle, but it had been required study in command school by the time she’d landed there. “And the thing that amazed me was that after she understood what had really happened, she was able to take charge of the negotiations in spite of her personal losses. And of her physical condition at the time, I might add.”
“And now my last child is down there on Narsai with her, and her mindfucker of a second husband. And the woman’s selling her own people out all over again!” Fralick’s face was flushed now, dark red with anger. “Captain, the people you just talked to admit that she’s at the heart of this mess too. You have to go in ready to fight, in fact the smart thing would be to—”
Greenberg cut him off. “I’ll decide what’s the smart thing for me to do, thank you, Mr. Fralick,” she said crisply, and she stood up. “Dismissed.”
The last time a Star Service officer had said that to him, George Fralick had been a young captain honorably resigning his commission in order to accept his first diplomatic assignment. He had proudly returned his commodore’s salute, and he had left the man’s office with his head held high.
Now Fralick stormed out of Sally Greenberg’s office, reflecting as he went that she was a lowly commander and an idiot and…
And forty years of carefully controlled anger, used rather than released even while he had taught his wife her place by forcing her to yield to him that one last time before she had left his house—even when he had snatched Madeleine from sickbay aboard the Archangel, and had taken the ungrateful child away from that mindfucker Casey to safety on the corporate marshal’s shuttle—yes, even during the incredibly infuriating moment of humiliation he had just endured from Sally Greenberg—spilled over. Inside George Fralick’s brain, the pressure became too much and an artery exploded.
He was dead before his body hit the deck outside Captain Greenberg’s office hatch, and even the Morthan surgeon who examined him less than five minutes later could do nothing to change that fact.